Michelle Obama joked that men would turn childbirth into an Olympic sport with trophies for skipping medication, while Sharon Stone said abortions would come from vending machines if men got pregnant.
On her “IMO” podcast, the former first lady sat down with actress Sharon Stone for a conversation that started on women’s reproductive health and quickly slid into jokes about what would happen if men could carry babies. OK Magazine reported the pair riffing on male pregnancy as performance, complete with cameras, awards, and bonuses.
Obama floated the idea of a full “Birth Olympics.” Men would film themselves going into labor, she said, to “honor their pain.” Trophies would follow for anyone who toughed it out without an epidural. “Well done, dude. Bob, you really did that without an epidural,” she imagined the announcer saying.
Stone piled on. “Paternity leave would be when you got the bonus,” she added. Then came the line that drew laughs from Obama: if men got pregnant, “you could get an abortion from a vending machine.”
Fox News reported the same exchange and noted Obama laughing along before expanding the bit into the birth-Olympics fantasy. The former first lady treated the whole scenario as light entertainment rather than a serious look at biology or the stakes of ending a pregnancy.
Stone did not stop at jokes. She described having an abortion at 18 after she and her boyfriend had “no concept of birth control.” She said she did not realize she was pregnant until he pointed out her weight gain. Her parents chalked it up to the “freshman 15.”
She could not get an appointment in Pennsylvania, so she traveled secretly to Ohio for the procedure. Afterward she bled for days in her room with no one to tell. A Planned Parenthood clinic later opened near her hometown and, she said, finally offered the sex education and resources she had lacked.
That personal history fed her broader complaint. Stone framed current limits on abortion and women’s care as backward, saying society does not want to give women OB-GYN care and wants to “prosecute women for having a miscarriage.”
"Now we don't wanna give women care, OB-GYN care, and we wanna prosecute women for having a miscarriage. What kind of arcane bulls*** is this?"
Obama called gaps in women’s medical research “astonishing” and voiced frustration that institutions long treated women’s bodies as too complicated to study. She urged a healthcare approach that focuses on women. The podcast framed those institutional complaints and the pregnancy jokes as part of the same conversation about motherhood and reproductive health.
Readers who follow her public remarks on family life have seen similar personal turns before, including when Michelle Obama discussed telling her daughters “no” in the White House.
Breitbart covered the same podcast and noted Obama mocking her brother Craig Robinson when he tried to change the subject. She kept the bit going instead of letting the talk move on.
The “if men got pregnant” line is an old progressive staple. It treats pregnancy as a policy problem men would solve with convenience and spectacle, while ignoring that only women get pregnant and that abortion ends a developing human life. Obama and Stone turned that talking point into punchlines about trophies and vending machines.
Stone’s story of limited knowledge and a secret trip across state lines is presented as proof that restrictions equal cruelty. Yet the podcast offered no engagement with the counter-view: that abortion involves two lives, that parents and communities have a stake, and that casual access talk can sound callous to people who see the procedure as anything but a vending-machine transaction.
Obama has used the podcast platform for other high-profile guests and political talk, including a session where Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson discussed security demands with her.
The former first lady has also spoken openly about life after the White House and her daughters’ independence, saying in one appearance that she does not miss Malia and Sasha after they moved out. Motherhood remains a recurring theme even as the abortion jokes landed with a harder edge.
These remarks fit a longer pattern of Obama-family cultural commentary that draws headlines and pushback. Institutions sometimes distance themselves too; Arizona State University quietly dropped the Obama name from a scholarship program in a separate episode that showed the brand is not automatically protected.
Here the substance is simpler. Two high-profile liberal voices reduced male involvement in birth to an awards-show gag and treated abortion access as something that should be as easy as buying a snack. They paired that with complaints that women are still underserved by medicine and over-policed on miscarriage.
The podcast never wrestled with the basic fact that pregnancy is not a gender-swap thought experiment. It is a biological reality that has always required responsibility, support, and clear moral lines. Turning it into “Birth Olympics” laughter does not make the underlying choices any lighter for the people who actually live with them.
When former first ladies and Hollywood stars treat abortion like a punchline and pregnancy like a men’s ego contest, they reveal how far elite talk has drifted from the gravity ordinary families still feel.
